<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>About Alias-i</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-type"
      content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language"
      content="en"/>
<link href="css/lp-site.css"
      type="text/css"
      rel="stylesheet"
      title="lp-site"
      media="screen,projection,tv"/>

<link href="css/lp-site-print.css"
      title="lp-site"
      type="text/css"
      rel="stylesheet"
      media="print,handheld,tty,aural,braille,embossed"/>

</head>

<body>

<div id="header">
<h1 id="product">LingPipe</h1><h1 id="pagetitle">About Alias-i</h1>
<a id="logo"
   href="http://alias-i.com/"
  ><img src="img/logo-small.gif" alt="alias-i logo"/>
</a>
</div><!-- head -->


<div id="navig">

<!-- set class="current" for current link -->
<ul>
<li><a href="../index.html">home</a></li>

<li><a href="demos.html">demos</a></li>

<li><a href="licensing.html">license</a></li>

<li>download
<ul>
<li><a href="download.html">lingpipe core</a></li>
<li><a href="models.html">models</a></li>
</ul>
</li>

<li>docs
<ul>
<li><a href="install.html">install</a></li>
<li><a href="../demos/tutorial/read-me.html">tutorials</a></li>
<li><a href="../docs/api/index.html">javadoc</a></li>
<li><a href="book.html">textbook</a></li>
</ul>
</li>

<li>community
<ul>
<li><a href="customers.html">customers</a></li>
<li><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LingPipe/">newsgroup</a></li>
<li><a href="http://lingpipe-blog.com/">blog</a></li>
<li><a href="bugs.html">bugs</a></li>
<li><a href="sandbox.html">sandbox</a></li>
<li><a href="competition.html">competition</a></li>
<li><a href="citations.html">citations</a></li>
</ul>
</li>

<li><a href="contact.html">contact</a></li>

<li><a class="current" href="about.html">about alias-i</a></li>
</ul>

<div class="search">
<form action="http://www.google.com/search">
<p>
<input type="hidden" name="hl" value="en" />
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="UTF-8" />
<input type="hidden" name="oe" value="UTF-8" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="alias-i.com" />
<input class="query" size="10%" name="q" value="" />
<br />
<input class="submit" type="submit" value="search" name="submit" />
<span style="font-size:.6em; color:#888">by&nbsp;Google</span>
</p>
</form>
</div>

</div><!-- navig -->




<div id="content" class="content">
<h2>Services Offered</h2>

<p>
Alias-i is an appropriate vendor for customers who need specialized
applications that are not met by other vendors (see our
<a href="competition.html">competition</a> page). We are a a good
choice if you have internal staff with solid Java skills and curiosity
about computational linguistics.

Our offerings include commercial licensing of LingPipe, consulting
services as well as basic R&amp;D efforts for our customers. 
</p>

<h3>Licensing LingPipe</h3>
<div class="sidebar">
<h2>How LingPipe got its Name</h2>
<p>
LingPipe was named after the concurrent version system (CVS) module in
which it was first stored.  The original version was a fairly
straightforward XML-based pipeline for doing sentence detection,
entity extraction, within-document coreference and then cross-document
coreference.
</p>
</div>

<p>
LingPipe is available under licensing terms that range from free to
perpetual server licenses. The distinctions between the licenses turn
on uses that LingPipe can be used for, extent of indemnification,
guarantees and support.  See our <a href="download.html">download page</a>
for an overview of the standard licenses. Contact us if the
available licenses do not meet your needs.
</p>

<h3>Consulting Services</h3>

<p>
Building NLP systems is a bit of a black art when it comes to deciding
feasibility, how to encode desired processing into the available tools
and system tuning. Our preferred model for working with customers is to 
teach them how to build NLP systems rather than leave them dependent on
us for system development.</p>

<p>
A commonly occurring arrangement for classification style projects proceeds as follows.
</p>
<ol>
<li>Customer provides 10 examples of manually processed text for which the customer desires an automated solution.</li>
<li>Alias-i provides feasibility based on examples.</li>
<li>Customer provides additional examples based on Alias-i feedback on applicability of state-of-the-art to business needs. Objective function defined for desired performance goals.</li>
<li>Initial prototype developed by Alias-i in conjunction with customer developers with a shared svn archive.</li>
<li>Additional training/evaluation data applied</li>
<li>Acceptance testing on linguistic goals</li>
<li>Hand off to customer developers with occasional interaction with Alias-i</li>
<li>Customer is responsible for integration of LingPipe functionality</li>
</ol>

<p> There is also a a <a
href="http://lingpipe-blog.com/2009/03/08/how-breck-approaches-new-projects-in-natural-language-processing/">more
detailed blog post</a>.</p>

<div class="sidebar">
<h2>LingPipe Customers</h2>
<p>
For a description of customer projects, see the:
</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="customers.html">LingPipe Customers Page</a></li>
</ul>
</div>


<p>

The goal of this process is to incrementally teach the customer
developers how to do NLP for the problems they care about as a by
product of annotation and shared coding. It has been very successful.

</p>

<p>
We have also done a range of information extraction projects, spelling
correction and customized database linking applications.
</p>

<h3>Research and Development</h3>
<p>
We offer development of customized extensions of the LingPipe
API for customers desiring capabilities not currently in 
the suite of tools. For example we developed query spell checking
at the request of Thomson-Reuters WestLaw. 
</p>
<p>
We have a history of government research contracts and grants. The
company was founded with DARPA funding under the TIDES program and
has more recently received two grants from
the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)
for linking text mentions to gene and protein databases.
</p>
<p>
We internally fund collaborations with academic institutions as well. We
have an ongoing collaboration with Harvard Medical School to create 
the world's best indexed research data collection for the autism literature
using non-specialists as annotators, as part of the 
<a href="http://bionotate.hms.harvard.edu/autism/index.html">BioNotate project</a>.

</p>

<h2>Company History</h2>

<p>Alias-i was founded by Breck Baldwin 1999 under the name Baldwin
Language Technologies.  The original funding source was a Defense
Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) research grant under the
Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization
(TIDES) program.</p>

<p>In early 2002, Baldwin Language Technologies relocated to New York
from Philadelphia and began doing business as Alias-i. In 2003 we released
the LingPipe tool kit and it has become the focus of our development. We offer
consulting services around LingPipe as well as basic R&amp;D services for
government, commercial and academic customers.</p>


<h2>Staff</h2>

<h3>Breck Baldwin, President</h3>

<p>Breck Baldwin received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1995 from
the University of Pennsylvania.  In the time between his
thesis on coreference resolution and evaluation and founding Alias-i
in 1999, Breck worked on DARPA-funded projects through UPenn. </p>

<h3>Bob Carpenter, Software Architect</h3>

<p>Bob Carpenter received his Ph.D. in cognitive and computer science
in 1989 from the University of Edinburgh.  Between 1988 and 1996, he
was a post-doc through associate professor at Carnegie Mellon
University.  He worked in the multimedia communications research
group at Bell Laboratories between 1996 and 2000, then at the
speech-recognition startup SpeechWorks, between 2000 and joining
Alias-i in early 2002.
</p>


</div><!-- content -->

<div id="foot">
<p>
&#169; 2003&ndash;2011 &nbsp;
<a href="mailto:lingpipe@alias-i.com">alias-i</a>
</p>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-15123726-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script></body>
</html>


